Daniele Sambo - Nove Viste

Join us from 6:30pm on Friday 2nd February for our first event of 2024 where we will be launching Glasgow based photographer Daniele Sambo’s “NOVE VISTE”

NOVE VISTE (Or Abelardo Morell in my grandmother’s house) is composed by a series of 9 photographs (Nove Viste: Nine views), where various views of the city of Venice, in Italy, are filling the rooms of an empty house in the historical centre of the island. The light is the only one left to occupy the space and it interjects, like a see through layer, the traces of life left on the walls. The photographs were realised by creating pin holes on the windows of the house and letting the light project the outside view on the internal walls. This technique very old and pre-dating the invention of photography, is borrowed as a tribute to the work of the Cuban-American artist Abelardo Morell and used here to discuss some of the dynamics that characterise the contemporary island of Venice such as abandonment and depopulation, but common also to other similarly fragile places. The series of photographs was taken in the house where our paternal grandmother lived. The population of Venice is declining by half every generation (1951: about 150,000 people, 1983: about 80,000 people, 2023: about 40,000 people).

The work was realised as a limited-edition series (5) of Pigment print on archival paper, 42x60 cm, in 2022. In 2023 we decided to create a small artist book in an edition of 5, in conversation with Lachlan Young, which also masterfully printed the work. These small boxes allowed the series to exist as a bloc of 9, altogether, as views from the same house. The size of the work is making a connection with the classic format of the postcard, creating a direct link with the same global tourism monoculture that is discussed by the work. The work is released and presented here as a second edition of 10 boxes. Each box contains the 9 fine art prints. A limited number of mini prints can also be purchased separately.